Forum:Alpha and Beta Quadrant borders
Some times ago, I started a discussion about the location and borders of Alpha and Beta Quadrants. As Capricorn kindly pointed out to me, the topic is already covered elsewhere and thet palce was really not the right place to discuss it. In fact I noticed that the topic is indeed treated in Beta Quadrant#Background information, but not, for instance, in Alpha Quadrant#Background information. Beside this, Background information sections on both pages, anyway, discuss about some shared topics. So I planned about summarizing all the shared information in a single template and use it on both pages, and other ones if and where necessary. The reason for this is to have one single place where to keep information about the same topic, simplifying maintenance. Capricorn suggested me to bring this topic to Ten Forward for further discussion, so I am following his advice with this post. Looking forward for comments from your side. --Lucamauri (talk) 10:44, October 27, 2019 (UTC) :I've no idea how technically feasable this solution would be, but the problem of the same note existing on different pages, and then diverging as a note is improved or fixed on some pages but not others is real, even if it's not too common. Examples I can think of are the dating note put here among other places, and terminology notes like the one here. My intuition is that this proposal might be more trouble to implement then the tradeoff justifies, but it seems worth discussing at least, and I'd love to hear viewpoints on hw doable it would be technically in particular. -- Capricorn (talk) 14:33, October 29, 2019 (UTC) As an example on how the shared text might be organized as I envision it, I created the template Template:Alpha Beta quadrant border taking texts from, but without making any changes to, the original pages. --Lucamauri (talk) 10:50, November 1, 2019 (UTC) ::OK, so a few things right up front: ::#Don't copy things from the address bar and leave the underscores in. It's lazy, looks like shit, and makes finding things harder than it should be. ::#Don't use HTML unless you have to. Line breaks come with spaces, so either use spaces or embrace the fact that paragraphs are the best format for multiple sentences devoted to a single subject. We're writing an encyclopedia here; our attention span is longer than a sentence. ::#Use natural English for template and file names. There is no reason anymore to avoid spaces or weirdly capitalize things because of that when it comes to file names. I know that everything we were taught in the 90s about this, and passwords for that matter, is stupid and wrong now, and that we keep perpetuating this for some reason, but let's try to make finding things as easy as possible going forward. ::With all of that out of the way, I made changes to the text to remove some speculation and bias and separate sources that were on screen from ones that were not, along with some formatting. This also requires a header, or an edit link like content on the main page, so people can edit the text without having to search for the template. The header is the more natural option for this though. Using a template is slightly better than the other options, duplicating text or importing text from one page to another, when it comes to finding and maintaining this, but does have the categorization issues and editing problem, which is why we haven't used this for other places where we have to duplicate text. That said, we can always try this and see if those problems outweigh the benefits. - 15:08, November 1, 2019 (UTC)